


don't look back to see

by AliuIce0814



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen, Terrible Nicknames, abuse and violence and terrible things, bruce wears his mommy's glasses and nobody can tell me otherwise, kirstin makes up backstory, mommies are people too, rebecca had a life before brian but not a life after him, rebecca is the best scientist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-16
Updated: 2014-01-16
Packaged: 2018-01-08 22:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliuIce0814/pseuds/AliuIce0814
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rebecca has a life before Brian. She's a person before Bruce. But who?</p><p>Dark stuff within. Lots of triggers, especially for abuse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't look back to see

**Author's Note:**

> TW for abuse, anxiety, depression.
> 
> All views expressed herein are totally mine. Vague knowledge of life in the late fifties-late sixties comes from my mum, who lived it. Mums are awesome. 
> 
> Unbetaed. Written at night. May go back and revise later.

                Rebecca Schoenstein is always Becca, never Becky, until the day halfway through the seventh grade when Mom yells, “Bye, Becca-boo!” as she pulls away from the school parking lot. Frizzy-haired Becca, already tormented for her wire-rimmed glasses, her obsession with animals, and the braces she’s worn for two years, storms into school with a bright red face. She’s forever after known as Rebecca.

            (After Mom dies during Rebecca’s senior year of high school, Rebecca wraps herself in Mom’s robe and holds her bottle of perfume to her nose. She whispers “Becca-boo” to herself until she’s sick with shame. When Dad comes in to check on her, she can’t find the words to explain her hysterical tears.)

            Rebecca Schoenstein is always the quiet girl until the day in junior physics that Emily McNally stumbles over an equation at the board. The senior boy behind Rebecca snickers and says, “’course a girl can’t do it, they’re all dumb bimbos.” That does it. Rebecca marches to the board, solves Emily’s equation and every other equation on it, and whirls around to throw her chalk and eraser at the boy’s head. She hits her mark both times.

            (She’s quiet the first time Brian hits her. Her glasses fly from her face and skitter across the floor. The shock steals all words from her mind. By the time she screams, “Don’t!” Brian’s already left the room. He takes her silence for submission every time after that.)

            Rebecca Schoenstein is always convinced she’ll be a medical doctor until she sets foot in her first college biology class. This isn’t simple organisms on a microscope slide like in high school. This is evolution, the very essence of life, and she reveres it. She puts everything she has into majoring in it—puts every ounce of her hopes and dreams on being the next Rachel Carson, another Rosalind Franklin. After all, biology’s progress influences the progress of medicine. It’s just as good as being a doctor.

            (She thinks back to this choice years later, when Brian backhands their son and sends him crashing headfirst into a door. She bandages his head the best she can. She soothes his tears by explaining what she’s doing and why she’s doing it. “This will kill germs,” she says, “and this will help the cut heal.” Bruce stares at her with dark and serious eyes. She holds back her tears while she keeps him awake through the night, just in case of a concussion.)

            Rebecca Schoenstein is always destined to be a braless hippie, a scientist of the New Age, and a happily single woman. Then she goes to a protest in the quad on campus. She wears flowers in her hair and a black armband as she screams about Vietnam and human rights. War is wrong. Killing is wrong. Too many people are dying, men and women and children. What kind of country abuses its children by sending them into an endless war? She has a voice, and has to use it—until the police come with fire hoses and rubber bullets. The protesters scatter. Rebecca, in the middle of it all, stumbles and falls, her glasses slipping off her nose—

            --only to have a huge hand catch her by her wrist and drag her upright. “Run,” the man says. She does because people who come after peaceful protesters with violence and hatred have no logic left to listen. She only slows down when the man makes her, just outside the science building. “This is my stop,” he says. He presses her glasses into her hands. Rebecca manages a “mine too, thanks” before she puts on her glasses and looks the man full in the face. She blushes more deeply than she did when her mom called her pet names in the seventh grade. The man’s rough but gorgeous. One of the protest flowers is caught in his wiry hair. He opens his mouth, and Rebecca’s lost, lost utterly. Brian Banner, PhD, guest speaker, knows everything from the inner workings of a clock to the mechanics of outer space. He speaks in the equations and probabilities that Rebecca dreams in. She thinks, finally, someone who understands—

            (Maybe she should be afraid already. His hand leaves fingerprints on her wrist for weeks. Rebecca justifies it by thinking, he saved me, and later, he doesn’t know his own strength, and even later, he loves me. It’s not until bruises mottle her son’s skin that her chest tightens with fear.)

            Rebecca Schoenstein becomes Rebecca Banner just before she graduates. Despite Brian’s disapproval—a woman getting a PhD? Even worse because she’s a biologist, not a physicist like him, even though she sometimes looks over his papers while he sleeps and corrects his errors—she goes to grad school. A year in, they move to an Army base for Brian’s work. In the rush of moving, she almost forgets her glasses and her medicine in the old house. Brian yells at her while she scrambles through the house, searching frantically for her things. He harasses her enough that she remembers her glasses but forgets her pill, The Pill, the gift of modern medicine. Months later, Brian yells and hits and threatens. She cries, but she wraps her arms around her stomach. Roe v. Wade hasn’t happened yet. She can’t trust anything illegal to be sterile. She’d rather have a baby than risk dying.

            She’s not sure about the baby until he comes and is Bruce, tiny Bruce with his father’s face but his mother’s hair and eyes. He clings to her finger with one frail hand and reaches for her glasses with the other. She whispers “Brucie-boo,” smiling at the prospect of him hating her for it when he’s in junior high. When he speaks for the first time, it’s a full sentence: “Mommy, why?” Rebecca answers it over and over. Why rain? Why sun? Why glasses? Why birds? Why guns? Why yells? Her farsighted son sees all, even when he’s not pushing his mom’s wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. Rebecca knows that her baby Bruce is a genius who thinks in a scientist’s terms. Brian hates him for it.

            (Maybe she should run—no, she should run. She knows this when Brian berates Bruce for being intelligent. She knows this when she hides Bruce in coat closets while Brian reeks of beer and whiskey. She knows this when she’s knocked down the stairs, waking up hours later to find that Bruce’s back is raw, his nose caked with blood. She knows this when, after weeks, months, years of her soothing Bruce with lies like “Mom’ll take care of you, baby,” Bruce strokes her hair and says, “Baby’ll take care of you, Mom.”)

            Rebecca Banner answers her son’s every “why?” She tells him, “I know mornings are hard,” when he cries as he wakes. She whispers the theory of evolution instead of lullabies. She kisses his every cut and bruise and tells him that he’s loved, so loved. She leaves him with memories of dancing in the rain and cuddling by the sink and wearing glasses too big for his face. She leaves him with a love of science and all things that grow. But his father leaves him with scars and hatred and flinching fear. When Bruce is a cowering man, a physicist and doctor with a monster inside who hates nothing more than himself, he wonders why Mom never ran with him. He understands fear, feeling trapped, but the deepest part of him asks another “why?” Why didn’t she keep him safe?

            (Maybe if she were alive, Rebecca would tell her son about ambitions crushed and mothers lost. She would talk about wars and bombs and insanity, a world where no one was safe. She would talk about genetics, how Bruce’s troubles weren’t simply born of nurture but nature as well, how her own hands shook as she stood in front of a class or protested or jumped between his father and him one last time. Maybe she would cradle her baby in her arms, even if he were a middle-aged man far too big for her lap. Maybe she would kiss his forehead or rub his back. Maybe she would apologize. Maybe she would just cry.)

            But there are no answers to these things. Rebecca Banner is dead, and no one alive has memories of Rebecca Schoenstein, for good or for ill. Bruce only has a child’s memory of her. He can only turn her into a saint or a monster. He pushes his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose and chooses the first. 

**Author's Note:**

> My Bruce is born in 1968. This puts Rebecca's birth year around 1945, which means she was in her early twenties when Bruce was born and late twenties/early thirties when she died. (My headcanon for this often differs from Marvel canon, so there you go.) The surname "Schoenstein" is my invention in that I'm the one who gave it to her. If it doesn't look like Marvel canon, it's me messing around. 
> 
> I'd love to write a ton more about Rebecca when I'm more awake.


End file.
